Periodic acoustic source tracking using propagation delayed measurements

There exist a large class of acoustic sources which have an underlying periodic phenomenon. Unlike the well-studied Bearings-Only Tracking (BOT) of an aperiodic acoustic source, this paper considers the problem of tracking a periodic acoustic source. For periodic acoustic tracking, the signal emission time is known. However, the true measurement reception time is unknown because it is corrupted by noise due to propagation delay. We augment the sensor’s signal reception time onto bearing measurements, and the information of the delay constraint is included in the original bearing measurements to compensate for the propagation delay. A Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF) is used for periodic acoustic source tracking, in which measurement prediction cannot be obtained directly because the sensor’s position at the true measurement reception time is unknown. We solve this problem by using the implicit Gauss-Helmert Sensor Model (GHSM) for estimating the sensor’s position, which consists of the sensor’s motion equation and the known measured sensor’s signal reception time equation related to the state. Then a CKF based on the GHSM (CF-GHSM) is developed for periodic acoustic tracking. Illustrative examples demonstrate that the CF-GHSM algorithm is better than other algorithms for periodic acoustic source tracking.